“Girls.” Dad broke the silence. “I had to get girls? The two of you don’t add up to one boy.”
He swore he would find the one who “did this” to us. Hunt him down. We knew word would spread. “Stay away from those twins with the crazy dad,” people would say. We would never get close enough to touch a superhero or a weatherman again.
When we were little, Dad wouldn’t let us into the house unless the temperature dropped below freezing. Now he wouldn’t let us out, all month, except for school. We couldn’t even babysit. “You’re lucky I don’t ground you both for the rest of your sad little lives for lying,” he said.
We balled our fists and vowed to teach him a lesson. “When he’s old and needs a ride to the hospital, we’ll say, ‘You mean the vet?’”
He punished Mom, too, for covering up for us. He confiscated her credit card.
We would take her with us, we said, when we left home for good.
Just as Granny had said we should, so many years ago.
The next fall we packed our bags. Dad could never ground us again. He could never again lock us out of the house all night in the cold and force us to sleep in a tent or a snow fort. Yell at us from his truck to cover our butts. Break all our mirrors and trinkets in a rage.
But he could still hurt Mom. Still make her squeal behind the bedroom door. Still confiscate her bank card. Unless we brought her with us.
So we lugged a bag up from the basement for Mom. We could hide her in our dorm room. Once we were sophomores, we could rent an apartment with a room for her. No one would ever punish her for helping us again.
But she stayed.
The biggest mystery of all was this: When we asked why, all she said was, “I love him.” The three most useless words.
If loving him meant putting up with his shit, we were done. We never had to talk to him again.
As a parting gift, Mom gave us a velvet box containing the famous diamond studs. The ones we had seen on Pixie that day at the shoe store. The box Dad had given to Mom after their big fight. We each took one and slid the post through the hole, fastened it tight, wore it always.
Then all we could do was pile our bags in the belly of the Greyhound bus, ride it out to I-94, and go west.
We left without her.
25
Was that it?” we asked each other. “That’s when we decided to cut him off?”
“Did we decide?”
“What’s that mean?”
Our toes were freezing in our funeral shoes. We stomped to make heat and kicked each other’s shins.
“We couldn’t protect her,” we said.
“She didn’t want us to.”
“We abandoned her.”
“She wouldn’t come.”
“We could have fit her inside our suitcase. She was almost that small.”
“Then we would have been as bad as him.”
“What else could we have done?”
“Fight or flight.”
“And if we had fought, someone would have gotten hurt.”
“As if no one did.”
“We went to college. Grew up.”
“Then why are we hovering here, stuck at seventeen?”
We stuffed our hands behind each other’s necks for warmth. We leaned against the wall and each other. We stretched our backbones long enough to remind us that we had them.
“Can’t we go back inside? There’s no evidence left.”
“There’s the rest of our lives.”
“Without Dad.”
“He’s not the one on trial here.”
“Then who is?”
But we knew.
For the first time that endless evening, we actually agreed. And only on one thing: we had been collecting evidence, all right, but not against Dad.
The defendant in this case was us.
Part Two
26
All freshmen at U of M had to share a dorm. Of course, we chose to room with each other.
We became Wolverines. Members of our hall, our class, our school. Or tried to.
We played icebreaker games at orientation but opted out of Two Truths and a Lie. We danced with a drink in each hand at frat parties, only to find, at the end of our favorite song, that our cups had spilled on our feet. We read about the lives of other freshmen on social media. We heard them complain in the cafeteria and watched them on the Diag.
Some of them were used to privacy, they said, and resented their roommates’ music or perfume so much they spent their afternoons in the library and their evenings in the lounge. Some were stuck with girls who couldn’t keep down their Jell-O shots, and, even after they laundered their sheets, the air in their rooms still reeked. Some found a new best friend, a crush, or even a mate in a random housing match. Some missed sleeping with their dogs and imagined their roommates covered with fur. Some were paired with boys who had never washed their own clothes before and who let their T-shirts sour with a cocktail of sweat, Coke, and ketchup.
We couldn’t have imagined not sleeping in the same room. Even the distance between our beds, no longer stacked bunks, sent cold wind through our blankets and made us sometimes roll off our mattresses and warm our hands in each other’s bedtime braids.
Some freshmen had blue hair. Some had shaved heads or bedheads. Some had pink skin or brown skin or black skin or black-and-blue skin.
Some, like us, had tattoos. We wore our eighteenth birthday presents to each other on the insides of our thumbs. The opening parenthesis on one of us, the closing on the other.
Some freshmen, we heard, had been fed bacon at every meal at home, and they rebelled by turning vegan. Some had grown up on slow food and became microwave pizzaterians. Some had relied on food stamps and now picked out of the cafeteria’s salad bar only the most expensive items, like pine nuts and raspberries.
Some grew up in the city, and they clutched their purses close to their bodies or planted their wallets and phones deep in the security of their front pockets. Some arrived from the country, and when they left their laptops on the study carrels, they were surprised to find them gone when they returned from a quick trip to the bathroom.
The first thing every freshman did, we later found out, before deciding who they trusted and didn’t, who might sleep with or tell on them, who might know all the answers and who might ask them to cheat, before telling each other where they were from and what their parents did or didn’t do, before even finding out each other’s names, was find someone to sit with at lunch. For real? Sometimes it did seem just like high school.
Some were from Grosse Pointe and had the boat club memberships to prove it. Some, from Birmingham or Bloomfield Hills, wore Bermuda shorts. Some were from Hamtramck or Ecorse or the wrong side of Eight Mile, and they reflexively locked every door behind them and always carried a compact canister of pepper spray in their pockets or purses. Some of them were from Traverse City or other points north and had packed an arsenal of winter coats and high-tech electric blankets. Some of them were from the Upper Peninsula and spoke about the joys of ice fishing with a brisk accent that reminded us of clear Canadian air. Some were from Flint and didn’t like it when people asked if their mothers had drunk the city water when they were pregnant.
Some had graduated from boarding schools like Cranbrook or prep schools like New Country Day and displayed their debate team trophies shamelessly on dressers. A few had gone to public schools like ours (though it took us months to find them), where popular kids trolled the halls spray-painting lockers in plain sight.
Most of them were singletons. None of them was one of us. But we would keep looking.
Some had come from outside the state. Some (not many) from California. Some from Virginia. Only virgins live in Virginia, we used to say, sitting in the elbow of our pear tree, inflating condoms from middle school health class. Now we couldn’t hear the name of the state without eyeing each other and giggling behind cupped hands.
Some freshmen had come from other countries—
Korea and China and India. Countries we would have traded limbs to visit if anyone had asked us to.
While we played foosball with our hallmates, we wondered, Would we like this new group of kin? Would we love them? More than our old one? Haley and Nevaeh hadn’t gone to college. We had said we would text them every day, but now that we had left them and our former life behind, we couldn’t think what to say.
Some of the freshmen in our hall complained about their dirty laundry, the dirty bathrooms. (They wondered aloud if that was how their moms spent Saturdays—doing laundry, cleaning toilets?) Most complained hardest about the slowness of the internet and the weakness of the cafeteria coffee.
They complained about the noise of their complaining.
But we were secretly happy, because the freedom to speak our minds was a new pleasure. No one listened in and threatened, “You want me to give you something worth whining about?”
Each room housed two of everything. We were used to sharing a desk and a dresser and a closet. Our beds were made for sturdy eighteen-year-olds. At home we had slept in the same ones since we had graduated from cribs. Our college-issued mattresses were stained with what was likely menstrual blood, but we imagined, instead, that they were darkened by longing. To find someone as strange as we were, to touch more than skin, to finally tell all. We still tossed in the night, trapped in a tangle of sheets, our eyelids stuck shut and mouths open wide as the sky.
Some freshmen dreamed of inventing a computer that could invent another computer. Our fantasies leaned toward recording contracts and Grammys. Of Granny’s disembodied voice saying, from our phone, “Finally, you ran away from home.”
We dreamed we were back in our brown-shagged house, plugging our ears against Mom’s squeals and Dad’s roars, which we didn’t yet understand.
Yet? Who were we kidding?
We dreamed of Dad cheating on Mom and Mom never cheating on her diet. We woke choking on our snores. Our ribs caved in. Our flesh disappeared. We almost evaporated. In the dark, we mistook ourselves for Mom and cried out so shrilly, our resident assistant knocked on our door. “You OK in there?”
Often, we were jolted by a violent storm and forgot it wasn’t Dad. We rolled off our beds to check on Mom, then remembered we had gone and she had stayed behind. Was she sleeping now? Was she dreaming of the freedom she had given to us but would not grant herself? Did she secretly envy us our distance? Was she dreaming of us dreaming of her? We took careful notes during all our classes, so we could teach her everything we were going to learn without her.
Some freshmen were orphans or half orphans. We just pretended we were.
We wondered if we would fit in. Some freshmen were descended from a long line of college-educated people. All, we often imagined, except us.
Girls like us didn’t deserve the best university in the state. Did they? They didn’t belong in Advanced Studio Orchestra their freshman year, but there we were. Letting the sawing of our bows sing the longing we couldn’t articulate with our mouths, as we held the notes so long our arms hurt. We took music theory tests, which made us feel more official and less special at the same time. As if our professor—the brilliant musician who had taught Mr. Haddad a generation ago—were taking the skim and the fat and turning us all into homogenized milk.
We lived on a two-person island that resembled a college dorm room.
Finally free to choose what to study, a few freshmen secretly wished, we suspected, that someone would tell them exactly what to do. We sometimes did.
Some freshmen had grown up in neighborhoods where drive-by shootings were as common as drive-through drugstores. Some had lived in public housing. Some still lived in their own private worlds.
Some had lived within minutes of university hospitals. Some had watched neighbors bleed to death before an ambulance arrived. We were from somewhere in between, right across the city border—not the well-scrubbed suburbs or their opposite. We had always thought we were middle class, but so did those with summer homes. If they were in the middle, where were we?
Some had gone to high schools that would later be decimated by a lone shooter’s rampage. They were lucky to have been born early enough to miss it, but they didn’t know that at the time.
Some had been shot at because of the color of their skin. Some had been attacked because they were trans. Some were told they were too ghetto to get into college. Some freshmen were going to hell, everyone said. Some of them had already tried, with needles, pills, or razors.
We kept searching—on the Diag, on social media, in the cafeteria. Hoping to see some of them turn into some of us. We painted our lips Red Delicious. We flipped our hair and dug fingers into our cheeks, pretending we had dimples. We fetched Frisbees thrown too far off the lawn. When the player who hadn’t caught the Frisbee ran away without a word of thanks, we buried our heads in our U of M hoodies.
Boys liked us, but we rebuffed the attention of those kinds of boys, the ones who saw only our long necks and goddess hair. Other boys? We never would have imagined we intimidated them. With what? Our height or speed? We didn’t know why a few girls approached and then slunk off, why most girls stayed away.
Did we seem too coupled, too self-sufficient, our twin codes too hard to read? Back then we just figured we were strange, like Dad. Maybe we hadn’t really left him behind. Maybe when our shadow fell across the Diag, it was shaped like his.
We shuffled into our freshman seminar. We wore jean jackets, leggings, and tall brown riding boots. The other ten students wore hoodies, soccer shorts, skinny jeans. Scuffed Chucks or dainty flats with bows. We all sat at a long table, the spiffy bow-tied professor among us, not even at the head. “Let’s go around and introduce ourselves,” he said, in either a Canadian or a fake British accent. “First name. Where you’re from. What pronoun you go by.”
Most chose the usual—he or she. Sometimes the choice matched our guess, sometimes not. Then one student—with a face like a Halloween crescent moon (the most striking in the room)—made throat-clearing noises for several seconds. “Staver. Grosse Pointe (a suburb of Detroit). And please—say ‘They.’”
“OK.” The professor nodded more times than necessary and jiggled his pointy black leather shoes with red laces, but he remained matter of fact, like a waiter taking sandwich orders.
We two scanned the table for the other half of the twin set but could find no second crescent moon. “They” was one guy. Or girl. Or both in one body.
We had always thought of ourselves as plural, but no one had asked us before. Then our turn came and we chose our pronoun. “We.” We had always wanted to.
“Both of you?” the professor asked.
“Of course.” Maybe he didn’t understand what the word meant. Or maybe we were wrong. We parsed the small print on the syllabus until our eyes hurt.
After class, we caught up with the other misfit pronoun on the way to the cafeteria. They were taller than us but just as slim. Short kinky hair with a glint of blue, the same color as their mascara. An Adam’s apple we couldn’t stop staring at. A credit-card-sized tattoo on their forearm that reminded us of a painting we must have seen on a postcard or at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
“Hey, Staver.”
“Hey,” they said.
In the cafeteria we picked out the salad bar gems, grape leaves and hearts of palm. Staver heated frozen pizza in the microwave. “If you don’t mind my asking,” they said, “are you gender fluid, too?”
We wanted to be, if it meant being like them. Confident about their otherness. We had always known that who we were was a slippery thing. We tapped each other’s thighs, which meant This one’s a keeper. We told each other, with the touch of skin to fingertips, that now that we had left our parents’ house, we were finally home. But we didn’t know how to answer Staver’s actual question.
“Nonbinary? Gender neutral? Genderqueer?” they asked.
Our faces hung blank.
“Do you know what those terms mean?”
> We had heard of them but wanted to hear more. We plugged our mouths with a grape leaf each and pretended we would have lots to say if only we could talk.
“Do you want to know?”
Our heads bobbed up and down.
“Pretend this is a box for girls. This is a box for boys.” They gestured with each hand. “What happens if you don’t fit in either box? Or if sometimes you’re in one, sometimes in the other? Or what if gender is like a house? You spend time in more than one room, right? For some people it’s more like clothes. One day you wear this”—they pointed to their pinstripe vest over an untucked collared shirt—“sometimes you wear that.” We followed their head to a girl at the next table in a strappy sundress. Staver continued to lecture us, gesticulating with their pizza, the pucks of pepperoni slipping on the grease. The flash seminar on gender and identity theory lasted till the cafeteria closed and we had to invite Staver back to our dorm.
They had a friend named Sebastian, who was also in our class. Staver texted him, and he arrived to help us push the beds together and stream Orlando while we drank through fat straws the bubble tea Sebastian had brought. Staver strummed our ukulele. We knew then they were one of us, even if we couldn’t have foreseen they would be the best man/maid of honor combined at our wedding.
Sebastian had the most symmetrical face we had ever seen, two twin halves, together round as a MoonPie. His part sliced his scalp right down the middle. He was balance incarnate. Long hair but broad shoulders. Tight pants but loose shirt, unbuttoned further than we had ever dared, even as the Slutty Twins. Wound-up curls but smooth skin, browner than ours. Shoulders back, head up when he walked; but a soft springy slump when he sank down in a chair, his ear turned toward us, mouth closed, eyes open so wide the lids disappeared. A face without hair, but a chest furnished with a delicious patch of fur. He was what we would paint if we could paint (and suddenly we burned to do it). We told him things we had never told even our best friends, and he nodded his head and said nothing. Hummed an earthy yogic om. A hand beckoned us to tell more. Then he plucked yarn from his pocket and wove us slender orange friendship bracelets matching his own.
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